15 March 2015 12:01 AM

Actually it does matter that the two main party leaders are forced to face each other in televised debates, each of them alone and cut off from the aides and scriptwriters who would otherwise whisper into their ears and make them look cleverer than they are.

Such events are the last faint trace of the raucous combative debate that politics used to be in this country.

It is incredible now to recall that, 51 years ago, the skeletal, hesitant aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home braved a furious 7,000-strong audience at the Birmingham Rag Market, a traditional ordeal for party leaders that he felt honour-bound to undergo.

His Labour rival, Harold Wilson, did likewise.

But can you remember when you last saw a major politician heckled? These days, audiences are screened to prevent it and offenders are dragged from the hall by heavies, as poor old Walter Wolfgang was when he dared to shout ‘nonsense’ – quite accurately – during a speech on the Iraq War by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

And it is nearly incredible to note that, in quite recent Election campaigns, party leaders faced daily unscripted press conferences from an unvetted crowd of uncontrollable reporters.

These events had almost vanished at the last Election (I think David Cameron gave three in the entire campaign).

Entry to them required security vetting. Most of those who attended were members of the Parliamentary Lobby, that mafia of mutual flattery in which politicians and journalists eat so many lunches together that it becomes impossible to tell them apart.

Informal questioning is also discouraged. Back in 1992, Neil Kinnock (a gentleman when all’s said and done) had to rescue me from the clutches of his aides, who fell on me in large numbers after I tried to ask him an unwelcome question on his way out of the hall.

On the final evening of the last Election, I attended a tightly controlled meeting addressed by Mr Cameron, hoping to get in a question about his astonishingly lavish parliamentary expenses, still largely unknown to the public.

As he left, I slipped alongside him to pursue the matter but was shouldered brusquely aside by his muscular police bodyguard, who knew perfectly well that I was no physical threat to the Tory leader but took it on himself to guard him from unwanted queries.

And this is how a lot of it has happened. The excuse of ‘security’ has enabled our political leaders to hide within a series of concentric screens and walls, until they see almost nobody but flatterers and toadies.

There is no real chance to make them sweat in public (the worthless exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions do not count). These debates might just be such an opportunity.

I am sure that is why Mr Cameron has used every trick and dodge to avoid them. Far from breaching their impartiality, the broadcasting organisations are doing their most basic duty by trying to get him to agree to a proper adversarial clash.

Finally a snap that shows the real Dave

Modern political propaganda makes great use of faked-up pictures of unlovely combinations on the steps of Downing Street, or of men in other people’s pockets.

Well, here’s a genuine picture of a very unlovely combination at No 10 (sorry, Mrs Cameron, I don’t mean you, but if you will keep such company…) , which I had never seen before and which seems to me to tell an important truth.

Anthony Blair is by a long chalk the most universally despised politician in Britain, rightly in my view, and mainly because of the Iraq War.

Yet all the vituperation and spite of which the world is capable is aimed at Ed Miliband, who opposed the Iraq War, beat his Blairite brother for the Labour leadership and who is loathed by Mr Blair and his allies.

And the main beneficiary of this sliming of Mr Miliband is… David Cameron, who once called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, who speaks often to Mr Blair on the telephone and who has several times invited Mr Blair to Downing Street. My photograph shows an occasion in 2012 when ex-premiers gathered there to meet the Queen.

Mostly, these events are not photographed.

A ‘source’ told one journalist in 2013: ‘Cherie and Tony have been round there for drinks. Blair and Cameron get on and they like each other. He [the PM] doesn’t like Miliband or Brown, in a personal way. He is very admiring of Blair, whom he regards as a nice person and has conviction.’

I see in this picture the ghost of a rather horrible future – a grand coalition of Blairite Tory, Blairite Labour and Blairite Liberal-Democrat, none of whom can win the Election on their own, but who can together combine against all the normal people in the country.

Why Lefties love a Right-wing buffoon

Jeremy Clarkson is a Left-wing person’s idea of what a Right-wing person is like (I wish this was my own coinage, but I owe it to Andrew Platt, a contributor to my blog).

That is why the BBC have for so long been happy to give him large chunks of prime time, and why the publishing industry gives him so much space.

If Right-wingers are all foreigner-despising petrolheads who hate cyclists and think smoking is a demonstration of personal freedom, how easy they are to dismiss. Nigel Farage is a sort of political equivalent of Mr Clarkson.

The idea that Clarkson is the heroic victim of politically correct commissars is ludicrous. The petition for his reinstatement is grotesque in a world where there is so much real oppression.

If you are in the mood for signing a petition for someone who is really being persecuted, please visit change.org and sign the e-petition for the release of my friend Jason Rezaian, locked up without trial and almost incommunicado by Iran’s secret state since July last year. You can sign it here http://chn.ge/1LCNKfO

Mind the drunk trees

What is the reason for our hatred of trees? Local councils love nothing better than murdering lovely old trees in case they fall down all of a sudden.

I now see that the French government plans to massacre thousands of roadside trees because cars often collide with them.

I assume this is because the trees get drunk, rush out into the traffic and steer themselves into the cars.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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25 June 2012 11:07 AM

After a long broadcasting famine, I have spent much of the past ten days preparing for, travelling to and appearing on BBC discussion programmes. (Question Time on 14th June, Daily Politics and Any Questions on 22nd June, Sunday Morning Live’ on 24th June). I promise you all this a coincidence, not a conspiracy. I wish it was a conspiracy. But it must have been a nightmare for my many detractors. In fact I know that it was, thanks to the curious thing known as Twitter.

I don’t really see the point of Twitter myself. Brevity is a discipline, but the space on a Twitter message, fewer than 30 words, isn’t enough to do anything more than a sound bite. As I prefer to follow facts and logic to their conclusion, it doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t at the moment think I shall start posting on Twitter. Apart from anything else, there’s always the risk of meeting Stephen Fry.

But I have learned how to keep an eye on what is said about me there. Imagine some of the dimmer, more abusive and in many cases anonymous attacks on me here, only briefer and in many cases with the worst four-letter words in the language included, and you have the picture. There are, it’s true, a few brave contributors who defend me, and I have been rather impressed by the thoughtful open-mindedness of Dr Evan Harris, of all people

A nice person, with the best of motives, told me after one of my appearances that I was ‘trending on Twitter’ as a result. This is a jargon term meaning that something I’ve said has attracted a lot of attention among Twitter subscribers. I told her ‘No doubt. But not in a good way’. And so it proved, when I later got to a computer screen (I am not one of these people who is joined at the hip to the Internet. I believe man should control technology, not the other way round).

As it happened, this very subject, of Twitter, came up for discussion on the ‘Daily Politics’. This is an interesting programme, presented by Andrew Neil, on which I appeared last Friday. Mr Neil’s great broadcasting talents are , in my view, wasted by the BBC. His problem is a much larger version of mine. We are both, in our different ways ‘right-wing’. And we both have some broadcasting ability, so we are allowed on. But we get quite different treatment from our leftish, liberal equivalents. I’ve been told by a very senior BBC bureaucrat that I will never be allowed to present a programme on BBC Radio - which I feel I would do at least as well as some of the current presenters. She didn’t feel the need to explain, and I didn’t feel the need to ask her to. And they can’t seem to bring themselves to give Mr Neil the presenter’s chair of any prime-time or flagship radio or TV programme, though (and I have many disagreements with Mr Neil) he would obviously be very good at it. So he limits himself to being the very good presenter of off-peak shows.

Anyway, there we were discussing Twitter and social media on ‘The Daily Politics’ on Friday, and I said that Twitter was ’an electronic Left-wing mob’. Among those present was Mary Ann Sieghart, a person prominent in the world of comment. I must confess to not having a soft spot for her, especially after a radio debate we once did on cannabis, during which I came very close (during the encounter and in the shared car afterwards) to actually grinding my teeth at her obdurate, irresponsible refusal to recognise the terrible dangers of this drug to the vulnerable young. I also suffered a bout of near-nausea when she once brought one of her (then very young) children to a Blair press conference during the 1997 election. But she is not always so infuriating. As she rightly points out, she opposed the Euro, and she has recently said some perfectly sensible things about schools.

A couple of days later, I was scanning the latest crop of personal abuse on Twitter, and found that Mrs Sieghart had tweeted, to the effect that I had said that Twitter was a left-wing conspiracy.

Now, readers here will know that I think (Think? I know. I’ve done it and seen it done) that individuals do secretly combine in our society to secure political and social change, and indeed other things. It’s generally called ‘lunch’ and s even more potent when it’s called ‘dinner’ or ‘kitchen supper’ . And some things just cannot be explained by coincidence. But to describe someone as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is not, in general meant as a compliment, and to say that someone thinks something is a conspiracy is generally to suggest that the person involved is a little obsessive, and unhinged, to be regarded as a pathological problem and in general dismissed.

I don’t believe Twitter is a left-wing conspiracy, either in the caricature sense intended by Mrs Sieghart, or in the sense that I think people combine secretly on Twitter to achieve a purpose. Why on earth would you do that? More importantly, I haven’t said so, and in fact said something plainly quite different and demonstrably true. What’s more, I said it on a recorded TV programme, where my words can be checked.

Anyway, I contacted Mrs Sieghart via her website , and pointed out that what she had said was incorrect. She e-mailed back to say she had corrected it. I checked to see what she had done, and this is what I found: ‘ Oh! Peter Hitchens has corrected me. Apparently you're not a left-wing conspiracy but a left-wing electronic mob. Silly me.'

Well, I’ve now written to her again, pointing out that, as a journalist, she really ought to know that it’s a basic part of the craft that you quote people accurately.

I then wrote (I have left out one or two rebukes that are better left private): ’ I politely corrected you in a private communication. You then managed to 'correct' your error in front of your fans grudgingly (You say 'apparently'? What do you mean 'apparently'? Do you seriously dispute it? You can check the record through I-player, and I'm sure the daily Politics people will provide you with a recording if that's not available. That's what I said, that Twitter is a left-wing electronic mob. What you wrote was not what I said... You also do so without any sign of regret … let alone contrition (at having published a misleading statement about a another person) , nor (of course) any apology to me, while suggesting ('silly me' is seldom used without sarcasm) that it's rather tiresome of me to object when the great Mary Ann tells untruths about me. ‘

Yes, Twitter is an electronic left-wing mob.

I’ll return later today with some other comments of pressing matters, and responses to your views.

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18 June 2012 3:14 PM

The Slime Factories were working overtime last week, as I once again dared to voice a dissenting opinion on the issue of marriage and parenthood. We have now reached a point where it is almost impossible to pronounce or write conservative opinions about this subject without being personally abused, misrepresented and intimidated. There is a reason for this, which I shall come to in time.

The chief dispenser of slime (though an army of righteous Twitterers stood, or rather yelled and squawked, behind her) was Emily Thornberry MP, member for Islington South and Finsbury, and the Shadow Attorney General. I will also say a little about her in a moment, but first a few general remarks.

Some contributors urge me to try to soften my position on fatherless families by hedging it around with tributes to the wondrous virtues of single mothers. This misses the point. It may well be that all single mothers in general are full of all the human virtues. I do not deny it. But even so they all face a problem. They must raise their children without a father to help them, which, however saintly, diligent and devoted they are, weighs them down with a disadvantage. The standard formula of ‘most/many single mothers do a great job’ always seems to me to be irrelevant to this question, and sounds apologetic over a position which needs no apology. I am simply not, as is always alleged against me, criticising the mothers themselves, as I repeatedly make perfectly, unequivocally clear in unambiguous language. I am criticising the politicians who encourage fatherless families, because the outcomes for the children of such families are in general worse than for those of stable married households (see below).

This discussion also raises the question of different types of ‘single mother’, a misleading category if ever there was one. There are the voluntary single mothers, the ones who have been recruited by the policies of successive governments for more than 40 years, who have become mothers without ever intending or seeking to marry the father of the child.

There are those who have initiated divorces (to be distinguished from those whose husbands have initiated them), who could also be said to have volunteered for the status of single parent, though some of them will plead urgent necessity, and none of us will be able to dispute their case, or want to. In the wilderness created by the Permissive Society, there are many miseries which aren’t really our fault, even though we take the decisions.

Then, quite distinct in my view, there are the wholly involuntary single mothers, deprived of husband and father by desertion or bereavement. And there are distinctions among these, between those who were married in the first place, and those who chose to embark on parenthood without the formal public declaration of permanence which is marriage.

As I discussed in my 1999 book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, a potent and successful campaign was fought in the 1960s to erase all these distinctions and treat all women bringing up children in the absence of a father as if they were the same. I believe the purpose of that campaign was to remove the social and moral barrier (known to its culturally revolutionary critics as ‘stigma’) against those adults who chose (or were encouraged by the state) to raise children outside marriage.

One long-term consequence of it (a fact which amazes many people) is that our welfare system no longer contains a specific widow’s pension. The state of widowhood is not, in itself, recognised as one in need of aid from the state. This change, which took place under Anthony Blair, is a break with almost all concepts of charity dating back thousands of years, under which widows and orphans were the first concern of any community. Interesting, eh?

The next question is ‘does it matter’? I would say that it does. One of the best summaries of the problem is to be found in a paper published by the think tank Civitas in September 2002, entitled ‘Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family’, by Rebecca O’Neill. It can be consulted here.

This paper was written to discuss the possible effects of the steep rise in births outside marriage, which began about ten years after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, and after the welfare reforms of the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments.

I will list some of the characteristics it identifies. Lone mothers are twice as likely to live beneath the official poverty line as are two-parent families.

Lone parents have twice as much risk of experiencing persistent low income as couples with children.

They are twice as likely to have no savings, eight times as likely to live in a workless household and 12 times as likely to be receiving income support (as it then was).

I am not arguing here about whether these (or other) conditions are the simple direct *result* of being a single parent, a more complex question for another time. I am just stating them as facts.

Other selected facts: single mothers have poorer physical and mental health. Young people in lone-parent families were 30% more likely than those in two-parent families to report that their parents rarely or never knew where they were. Lone parents were significantly more likely than couples to have strained relations with their children. Between 20 and 30% of absent fathers have not seen their children in the last year. Between 20% and 40% see their children less than once a week. Children in lone-parent families are nearly three times as likely to describe themselves as unhappy as children raised by couples, have more trouble in school, worse physical health, and are at greater risk of all kinds of abuse.

Put simply, their lives in general are worse, and will be worse. A wise government would seek to discourage this form of household, for the good of the country as a whole – not by punishment or cruelty but at the very least by *ceasing to encourage it*. My favoured tools for achieving this are the end of subsidies for *future* single parent households (existing ones have been made a promise which must be kept until their children are grown), with a reasonable period of notice that this change is to take place, plus severe reforms of the divorce laws, making divorce considerably more difficult for couples with children than it is for those without them. I also seek moral and cultural changes, which would make parenthood outside wedlock less likely, and make marriage more difficult to begin, as well as harder to end.

By the way, as this touches on moral territory, I should mention that I am chided elsewhere for saying that my pleasures are private, when I have views on the pleasures of others. But my private pleasures are legal, and do not in any way influence me towards campaigning for changes in the law which would make illegal pleasures more common. And, as I have many times stated, I do not attack private individuals for their private moral decisions, though I might defend myself against their immoral actions. This is not because I don’t think people do many wrong things, or because I don’t disapprove of those wrong actions. I do. But above all I must disapprove of my own wrong actions. Morals are a matter for the individual, and God.

On the other hand, I attack politicians and their media and academic allies for pursuing polices designed (or predictably bound) to distort human behaviour in immoral (and therefore in my view unhappy or dangerous) directions.

I do not in any way blame the women who have chosen to raise children on their own, because they are subsidised by the welfare state to do so. Their decision is entirely rational (and morally far preferable to the abortion of the child, a choice which is, alas, open to all). It is also easy to see why young women, with a strong and good natural desire to become mothers of babies (a wonderful thing in itself, and easy to understand) wish to avoid entanglements with the often feckless and irresponsible young men created by our fractured families, our wrecked schools, our culture of drivel and our morally bankrupt society and state. Likewise, in a state where marriage is more easily ended than a car leasing agreement (and is very often so ended) it is hard to condemn those who entered into such a lax agreement, later deciding to end it.

How can any reasonable person, likewise, hold a woman responsible for having been deserted or – even more absurd - bereaved? I certainly don’t. The amazing thing is that I am accused of this by people who appear to be in possession of all their faculties.

Why do they do this? They do it because the nationalisation of childhood, and the marginalisation of strong independent families in which private life and free thought flourish, is one of the main projects of the modern radical state, just as it was one of the central policies of the Communist state in the USSR. Weak families are a necessary consequence of the strong parental state, and its desired aim.

Many of these statist radicals are extremely hypocritical, themselves maintaining traditional two-parent households while pursuing policies which tend to eradicate such households among the poor and weak. This, along with the hypocrisy of imposing egalitarian schools on others, while avoiding it for your own young, seems to me to be the crowning hypocrisy of leftism.

Which brings me to Emily Thornberry, with whom I clashed on BBC Question Time last Thursday, 14th June 2012. At the time of writing, this programme is still available on BBC i-player. But I have in any case transcribed the central exchange, which now follows:

The actual question was: ‘Do you agree with Community Secretary Eric Pickles that problem families have had it easy for too long?’

My answer was : ’I don’t think we’re entitled to sit here, any of us, and start saying anybody is having it easy in the poorer parts of our country. That’s not the point. The point is whether they are being given the sort of help they really need.

‘I don’t think that compassion should necessarily be expressed by throwing money at these people. I think that Eric Pickles probably feels the same way. But because this government is in effect a fraud which makes conservative statements and does no conservative things, nothing will come of this. But I think his general idea that what we need to do is to look at the reasons why we have so many problem families - which are fundamentally the destruction of the married family by the deliberate subsidising of fatherless families and an enormous welfare dependent class - then we might be able to do some good. But it doesn’t do any good being rude to people, except to politicians, who deserve it.

‘It doesn’t do any good being rude to people who are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are acting perfectly rationally. If you create an enormous welfare state, people will obviously go and collect the welfare which is offered to them and they will behave in the way which the welfare state persuades them to do. That is why we are in such a mess. And until we get serious welfare reform aimed at bringing back the solid family life which people used to enjoy in this country and which used to be particularly good for the upbringing of children, then these problems will persist, I just think Eric Pickles is showing off and pretending to be a conservative without actually being one, and offending people without doing any good.’

Emily Thornberry: ‘Before I came along today I was advised to do yoga deep breathing and to make sure that I didn’t get wound up by Peter Hitchens, but I just have already and we’re only on the second question. I suppose that given that my family that I was brought up was fatherless, and I suppose the fact that my mother was on benefits and that we lived in a council estate means that we were one of the problem families that you talk about, Peter. But actually, do you know what, we had a solid family life and we did well and me and my brothers did well and my mum struggled, and how dare you say that women, that single parents that live on council estates are therefore by definition problem families? How dare you?’

Thunderous applause. Stormy applause.

PH: ’Had I said any such thing your phoney outrage would be justified. But as I didn’t, it isn’t. And you really do need to do a bit better than that.’

ET : ‘I made a note. (PH ‘Yes...’).

ET ‘You talked about problem families being fatherless and you talked about them being on benefits and that describes the family life, that describes me as a child – and we were not a problem family.’

PH: ‘It’s the subject under discussion. I didn’t say anything about your family or anything of the kind. You are just engaging in phoney outrage for political propaganda purposes, which is what your Party always does... Pathetic rubbish.’

(I should note here that Grant Shapps MP, the ‘Conservative’ Party’s representative on the panel ‘absolutely agreed’ with Emily Thornberry that ‘this is nothing to do with people who have one or two parents, who are rich or poor or anything else’.)

Greg Dyke, my old university acquaintance and former Director General of the BBC, asked what could be done about it ‘without having this sort of banter.’

PH: ’If you try and suggest what you should do about it, you get buckets of slime chucked over you by Labour politicians, and there’s an end to it. There is a simple problem, almost all serious work on the problems of problem families, a phrase not introduced into this discussion by me, in any major country, any major advanced country, will tell you that these problems are concentrated where there are no fathers, and if you won’t do anything about that, then indeed, if you continue to pursue policies which create more and more fatherless families, you will get more of it. I’ll carry on saying it however many times people chuck buckets of slime over me for saying it, because it is important and needs to be addressed.’

I wonder if any of my critics (preferably the intelligent and coherent ones) can identify anything in my spoken, broadcast words above that justified Ms Thornberry’s outburst. If so, can they please say what it is?

I telephoned Miss Thornberry over the weekend and asked her if she would, telling her that I planned to blog about this, and giving her my e-mail and telephone details so that she could respond to this specific question. She has not yet done so.

I attempted to discover if Ms Thornberry (she is, by the way, married to a distinguished barrister, now a judge, and lives in an attractive part of the fashionable London quarter, Islington) had any coherent critique of what I had said, or indeed understood my general point. I found fairly quickly that we spoke a different moral and political language. But, while I was aware of the existence of her view and language, she was more or less unaware of mine. We were, as the old joke goes, arguing from different premises.

In fact, Emily Thornberry’s personal story is a good deal more interesting than her outburst would suggest. She did indeed grow up in a council house, in the absence of her father. But if anyone thought she was just an ordinary working-class girl made good, they were mistaken. Her mother Sallie, alas no longer with us, was a most courageous and distinguished person, and also much-loved by political allies and opponents alike. She was a teacher by profession, and an active and popular Labour councillor who became, despite the privations and difficulties of her life, Mayor of Guildford in Surrey, by no means a Labour town.

But the family was not fatherless in the sense that it had never had a father. Nor was Sallie Thornberry unmarried. On the contrary, she was married to a distinguished and talented academic lawyer, Cedric Thornberry, who lectured at the London School of Economics, and rose to become Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations. He is still active in the international human rights industry.

I do not know or seek to know exactly how he came to leave the family home, though he did so when his daughter was seven and his sons even younger. It is perhaps significant that Emily Thornberry omits all reference to him from her entry in ‘Who’s Who’ (those in Who’s Who’ write their own entries), though she does mention her mother. Whatever happened, Emily Thornberry has unpleasant, rather shocking Dickensian memories of bailiffs, and of going off to live in a council house in pretty sharply reduced circumstances.

To give you some idea of our differing responses to this episode, she believes it is an argument for better state childcare to allow women such as her mother to go out to work. I believe it is an argument for strengthening marriage, and placing a higher value upon fidelity and constancy, and upon promises.

She also, I believe, failed her eleven-plus, went to a secondary modern, and later to a comprehensive before studying law at the University of Kent and becoming a successful barrister.

This casts an interesting light on her decision to send one of her children to a partially selective state school (a very rare category), a dozen miles from her home. I asked her how she explained the divergence between her personal educational policy, in favour of selection, and of her party’s educational policy, implacably opposed to selection. And I’m afraid she went quiet, and then attempted to make it an issue of her children’s privacy. I have not named and will not name the child or the school. It is about her, a public figure who has sought and obtained public office and seeks to take part in the government of the country, as an acknowledged member of a political party which has endorsed her, and whose endorsement she has sought and accepted. That political party is opposed to academic selection in state schools.

It’s my belief that Emily Thornberry is a decent person (anyone with a mother like that has to be) but that she still has much to learn about principles and about civilised debate.

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16 October 2011 8:58 AM

Hypocrisy isn’t what it used to be. Once, Christian preachers would thunder about the virtues of marriage and then be discovered canoodling with women who weren’t their wives. Everyone would laugh.

Now, pious politically correct persons seek, by innuendo and hint, nudge and wink, to damage a Cabinet Minister by suggesting that he is a secret homosexual. And nobody laughs at the slimy dishonesty of it all.

Everyone pretends to be very concerned about the ‘Ministerial Code’, and about various boring meetings in hotels which may or may not have been attended by some youth.

They even discover, with feigned horror, that the Ministry of Defence is sometimes approached by people who want to make money by selling weapons. Gosh.

But none of this serious, detailed stuff is the real point of what’s really being said. Everyone knows it. Nobody admits it.

Here’s what is really happening. The modish Left know deep down that the public don’t agree with them about homosexuality. In private, they themselves may not even believe the noble public statements they so often make.

And so, without ever openly admitting what they are up to, they destroyed a Minister they disliked for allegedly doing something they officially approve of.

I am no friend of Liam Fox. I know nothing about his private life and care less. But I think it is a very dirty business that Left-wing newspapers, which claim to believe that homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality, behave in this way.

It’s particularly striking that this came almost immediately after the Prime Minister deliberately teased what is left of the Tory Party by saying he favoured homosexual marriage.

I suspect that Mr Cameron was trying to goad the enfeebled Right wing of his party. If they had reacted, he would have crushed them to show who’s boss.

The Left – and Mr Cameron is of the Left – have done this for many years. Moral conservatives have foolishly lumbered into the trap by objecting. And so they have allowed themselves to be smeared as the cruel persecutors of a gentle minority.

But the events of the past week show clearly that the Left, for all their noisy sanctity on the subject, are far from free of prejudice against homosexuals, and quite ready to use such bigotry when it suits them to do so.

Protecting the wrong flock

How typical of the furry Archbishop of Canterbury that he can stand up against the persecution of Christianity in Africa, but isn’t aware of it here.

We shall see in time if he did any good by sharing tea and scones with the sinister Robert Mugabe.I doubt it.

But his behaviour is typical of a church which has been so obsessed with the Third World for so long that it has forgotten the country of its birth, where legions of bureaucrats – often aided by soppy vicars – are quietly strangling the Christian faith.

My guess is that there will be a thriving Anglican church in Africa several centuries after Canterbury Cathedral has been converted into a mosque, and St Paul’s into a museum.

*********************************************************************

A worrying film of a worrying book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is about to open in this country.

It concerns the culprit of a school massacre, and – though the fictional killer is on SSRI ‘antidepressant’ medication, as almost all such killers are – neither book nor film grasps the significance of this. They minimise it. What a pity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the alleged culprit of the latest rampage killing, Scott Dekraai of Seal Beach, California, is said to have been suffering from ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, which in the USA is often ‘treated’ with SSRI pills. He is also said by his ex-wife to be ‘a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same’.

Eight more people are dead, quite possibly at the hands of someone who had been taking ‘antidepressants’. Isn’t it time the authorities looked into this connection?

********************************************************************* Rock superstars such as ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney are the new aristocracy.

Normal human beings bow and simper in their presence, their path is cleared through life, and their dull, unoriginal thoughts are treated with respect.

They also exude a tremendous smugness, these vegetarian, animal-loving, charity-supporting types who cram their unfortunate children into state schools to prove that a billion pounds hasn’t turned them into conservatives.

But when it comes to basic neighbourly behaviour, they are as yobbish as the over-rated music that made them rich and famous. Council officials had to be called to the McCartney wedding party in London in the small hours of last Monday to get him to turn down the racket.

If he’s so nice, why didn’t it cross his mind that others have jobs to go to and might need to sleep?

********************************************************************

In a prison in ‘liberated’ Libya, Amnesty International inspectors report having seen instruments of torture and having heard ‘whipping and screams’ from a cell.

There is also clear evidence of racial bigotry in the savage treatment of non-Arab Africans. So, if we intervened there to ‘protect civilians’, why aren’t we intervening now?

*****************

Street demonstrations are usually a waste of time at best. But they can also be dangerous or harmful. And I must appeal to any readers I have in Boston in Lincolnshire to stay away from a march against immigration planned to take place there next month. I also appeal to the organisers of the march to call it off. And I’m hoping for sleet, and a strong east wind off the Wash, on that day. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago I described the damage that stupid Government policies have done to Boston, which now has a huge migrant population mainly from Eastern Europe.

I did not blame the migrants, whose enterprise I admire, or those who employed them. I hoped to illustrate the wrongness of our open borders, and of the EU membership that forces us to keep them open. I also wanted to assail the terrible schools, the dim welfare policies and the family breakdown that have left so many British-born young people unemployable.

Some concrete-headed councillor in Boston chose to attack what I had written, and cast doubt on its truth, reasonably angering many Bostonians who knew that what I had said was correct.

But a demonstration in such a place can do no good, and may well cause tension and bring undesirable political chancers to the town. Already, an outfit called ‘Unite Against Fascism’ (what ‘fascism’, by the way?) is planning a counter- demonstration on the same day. Just imagine the stupidities that could lead to.

If there is trouble, it will only damage the cause of those who want common sense to prevail in this country again. Call it off.

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12 October 2011 2:42 PM

I’m generally uninterested in political scandals. They are a substitute for proper politics, which I think are enjoyed by political reporters far more than they are by voters. To this day, I do not understand the Westland Affair which led to the resignation of Michael Heseltine, and I was working at the House of Commons at the time, surrounded by gossip on the subject. I think my brain just glazes over as soon as I hear the words ‘Ministerial Code’.

I have tried, for some years now, to point out that the MPs’ expenses scandal was wholly selective in its victims. I don’t know if all those who had actually committed criminal offences were prosecuted ( I suspect not). But it wasn’t what was illegal that mattered. It was what was legal. If you look at the much wider question, of naked greed, lawfully pursued, some MPs were utterly destroyed and others sailed through the storm unruffled and not even damp.

Some of you will recall the account I gave of David Cameron’s meeting with his Witney constituents about his expenses claim, here. I still think it astonishing that this event was attended by only three national newspaper journalists (me, Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail and Ann Treneman of ‘The Times’) given the scale of the story, and the fact that Mr Cameron was widely expected to be our next Prime Minister at the time. No national broadcaster had its own equipment or staff there (Witney is 70 miles from London). I only knew about the meeting because it had been mentioned in the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail and I live just outside Mr Cameron’s constituency. I had then mentioned it to Stephen Glover one day in the lift at Associated Newspapers, who also lives in Oxford. At that time I had assumed that it was already widely known in Fleet Street. It wasn’t. I believe Ms Treneman had been alerted at the last minute by her newsdesk, who had been called by a Witney taxpayer to let them know.

When I tell normal people (i.e. those not obsessed with the news) the story of Mr Cameron’s generous (to himself) housing claims, they are amazed by the information. They know about the wisteria and the chimney (giggle, giggle, how trivial and silly!) but they are completely unaware of the scale of his claims for mortgage interest, among the highest made by any Member of Parliament. If the media flock had seized on this and run with it (Millionaire MP gets you to pay his Mortgage Interest’ ‘Millionaire MP’s taxpayer-subsidised country home’ etc) I don’t think Mr Cameron would now be Prime Minister.

Why didn’t this story ever take off? Well, you will have to guess, but regular readers here, and readers of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ will know my views on the flock mentality of the bulk of British political journalists (from this I very much except my excellent colleagues on the Mail on Sunday, who diligently pursue their own stories and are not part of any flock). Sometimes they bleat wildly and charge around the field like mad. At other times they gaze soulfully at you as they chomp their jaws, and refuse to get excited. Peter Oborne, another non-flock journalist, has also written very interestingly about this, and recently accurately described most political journalists as ‘courtiers’.

So scandals can be, and are, selective. And the increasingly tight rules applied to MPs and Ministers are designed to treat them as employees (of whom, exactly? This is one of the most interesting questions in our constitution) rather than independent men and women.

It’s a cliché to say that Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George could never have survived the sort of scrutiny politicians now face. But it’s a cliché because it is true. And people really should work out the implications of that. Which would we rather – that politicians had faintly dodgy friends who bankrolled them through periods in the wilderness, or that they were meek, pliable employees of the executive who never dared to speak an independent word?

And if they keep their private lives private, and treat their fellow creatures decently and kindly, is it in our interests to destroy them? I’ve grown increasingly tired of the scandal approach to politics, not least because I’ve been involved in it in the past.

When I was a reporter in Washington DC, I got marginally involved in the ‘Troopergate’ affair, in which Bill Clinton was accused by a rather sweet young lady called Paula Jones of, well, pursuing her round a Little Rock hotel room with his underpants off. I spent a long time on the phone with Miss Jones, much of it almost doubled up with laughter at her entirely believable descriptions of the then Governor of Arkansas in his semi-naked state. I was never after able to watch a State of the Union address in the same way.

My then newspaper was quite interested in this stuff. My hopes of concentrating entirely on higher things during my Washington DC posting had been shattered when I found myself living in a rather basic motel in the pleasant town of Manassas, Virginia (scene of two major Civil War battles), covering the appallingly explicit trial of Mrs Lorena Bobbitt , who had removed her husband’s manhood with a kitchen knife. This event was obviously interesting, though I think a few years ago we would have hesitated to report it. Newspapers, as I so often say, stay independent by being commercially successful. They have to follow public taste to some extent. Had I been at home, I’d never have reported on any such thing, as the newsdesk would reasonably and rightly have assumed I was the wrong person for such a job, but a foreign-based reporter has to do everything that turns up (I once found myself pursuing Princess Diana around the District of Columbia too. She was escorted by a car prominently marked with the words ‘Secret Service’, a thing that has always made me smile).

And sexual scandal – of the type involving Mr Clinton - is interesting, much more interesting than financial scandal, or conflict-of-interest scandal. But I have since reflected that Bill Clinton may have invaded the, er, privacy of quite a lot of women, some more willing than others – but he never invaded Iraq. And which is more important?

Likewise, many of Anthony Blair’s Cabinet fell to the scythe of scandal – David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson, and others I now forget. But the really scandalous members of that government, Mr Blair and Mr Brown themselves, remained in office throughout.

What about Liam Fox? I’m not a Thatcherite and find his brand of conservatism unappealing and sterile. I think his review of our defences has been mismanaged and wrongly directed, even on the assumption that most of these cuts were really needed. I don’t like his taste in birthday-party shirts. I’ve had two conversations with him in my life, the latter a couple of weeks ago when he chatted to me about a recent flight he’d had in an RAF Typhoon jet. I’ve heard gossip and rumours about him as I have about many politicians, but I wouldn’t pass it on because I have no idea if it’s true, or just the usual mildly malicious tittle-tattle that requires no evidence and may easily be wholly false.

What’s important is the government of the country. Scandal, in which the occasional minister is forced to resign, is a substitute for our lost power to remove a government and replace it with a different one. If we remove a government now, we get the same one with different faces stuck on it.

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13 June 2011 4:08 PM

Is there any point in public debate, in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?

Sometimes I wonder.

I asked a simple question in my main column item – about why Christians, in their charitable work and in their engagement with wider politics, should make no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

I produced two unambiguous quotations from scripture which clearly permit, and indeed demand, such a distinction. It would be odd if they did not. The idea that someone could live comfortably at the expense of his fellow men , when he was able to work, would have been so unthinkable to any previous civilisation that it would have been regarded as absurd.

The real question is whether the modern creation of a large welfare-dependent class in our society is an improvement on the past, or a worsening if the human condition. I tend to think it is the latter, and to blame many of the faults of our cruel, coarse, disorderly society on the extension of welfare to people who do not really need it , and the reclassification of human weaknesses and failures as incurable ‘disabilities’ which must be indulged. In some ways worse, these failings (drug-taking, drunkenness etc) are equated with genuine disabilities which are not in any way the fault of the sufferer.

But my critics don’t take this up. Some go into diversions about the rich. Well, if the rich start claiming welfare payments, or evading the taxes they are legally obliged to pay, then I’ll start condemning them for it. But if not, they’re not part of the argument. The rich ( I know this annoys communist levellers, but it’s true) spend their own money. Welfare recipients spend other people’s money, taken from those other people by taxation under the threat of imprisonment.

Then I was accused of indulging in theology, by atheistical logic-choppers and show-offs who have swallowed R.Dawkins and A.C.Grayling, and long to lure me into some futile dispute on a subject which doesn’t interest me and in which I’m not versed – not because they actually wish to debate the subject, or would ever concede their position as a result of argument, but because they wish to show off. No dice, guys.

I think this is in any case mistaken. Theology is to do with the philosophical arguments for religion as such. I wasn’t making any. I never do. My only point is that we are free to choose whether to believe or not, as I have many times explained here. Quite a lot of my opponents actually seek to deny this choice by various means, which generally have little to do with facts or logic.

The most I could be accused of here is internal scriptural exegetics, aimed only at people who already accept the Christian faith, and at one who, in the Archbishop’s case, is its chief representative in this country. The quotations I produced from Holy Writ are wholly unambiguous and can only be interpreted in one way. They are also from the New Testament, uncomplicated by the supersession of many Old Testament laws by the new covenant.

None of the other hostile comments addressed this simple point – that there are different sorts of poor people, and it is reasonable for Christians to distinguish between them.

My own view is that those who needlessly throw themselves on the charity of others are active thieves from the poor (who are in the end the main source of both tax and charity) and frauds on goodness, who poison the wells of generosity and altruism, and their actions cry out for justice. This does not in any way affect my belief in charity as a duty.

Likewise, nothing I said from the Question Time platform in Norwich is specially controversial. Most serious persons agree that much foreign aid is wasted, misdirected and misappropriated. Some does positive harm. The late (Lord) Peter Bauer, who knew more about this than all of us put together, did say what I quoted him as saying. The proportion of our aid budget which is controlled by the EU is as I said ( I confirmed the figures with Mr Mitchell’s department that morning, and he told me he had personally signed off on the answer).

Yet I was treated as if I had said all aid should be stopped, which I didn’t say, and don’t believe.

Likewise it is true that our society was until the 1960s a sexually restrained and puritan one, and that it changed largely because an active and persuasive minority wanted it to change, though many others have since decided that they, too, approve. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest (my main point) that the sexualisation of children is a consequence of that . It is undeniable that sexually charged and explicit material pours out of the radio , the TV and the Internet.

As for sex education, much of it is aimed at overcoming the inhibitions of pupils about what many of them reasonably regard as private or embarrassing matters (the use of joke words for body parts in class, etc). It is perfectly reasonable to describe this as taking away the innocence of those exposed to it. As I have said before, if any adult apart from a teacher said these things and illustrated these acts in front of our children, mobs of News of the World readers would be breaking their windows and demanding they be sent to jail forever. As it is, they’re paid to do it by the taxpayer.

Sex education was originally devised by George Lukacs, as education commissar during the brief Hungarian Revolution, to debauch the minds of religiously-brought-up children. When it was first introduced in this country it was purely biological, and heavily circumscribed. It is only as the power of parents has declined, and that of social workers and teachers increased, that (under the excuse of combating disease and under-age pregnancy) it has been permitted to become so explicit and to be based on the assumption (itself both false and morally questionable)that the young will have sex outside marriage whatever anyone says or does.

As for my statement that the pretext for sex education is that it will prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies etc, this is demonstrably so – that is what its advocates say it is for. Equally true is my further statement that, the more sex education we have had, the more STIs and unwanted pregnancies we have had. In the absence of research into this correlation, we may only guess as to the cause of it, if any. But what is certainly true is that sex education is failing *on its own terms*.

Nothing I said was specially controversial. On Libya, many of my critics in the audience would have agreed with me if it hadn’t been me saying it. As it is they didn’t want their views expressed by such a wicked person (‘the Sunday Mail hack’).﻿

The howling intolerance of a vocal section of the audience (and the licence given to members of that audience to barrack me and interrupt me) shows how any defiance of current orthodoxy is now greeted not with argument but with rage. It is probably a good thing that there was no question about man-made global warming, or who knows what might have happened?

All this has drawn attention away from other oddities about the programme. Why does the Coalition now qualify for two members of a five-person panel? Isn’t a newly-elected MP who hasn’t risen above the rank of Parliamentary Private Secretary a bit junior for such a task? And why was the Labour Party represented by a man who, while a heavyweight politician, is no longer even in Parliament? Wasn’t anyone in the Shadow Cabinet available or able?

I should not here how grateful I am for the kind letters and e-mails I have received from viewers who felt that I had been unfairly treated, or needlessly abused. I can’t really complain for myself – if I couldn’t take a joke, I shouldn’t have joined, and I’ve experienced far worse than that in TV studios and elsewhere. It is a reasonable price to be paid for getting on to the most powerful medium of modern times, which conservatives have to use if they can, whatever they may think of it. The real sufferers from the unfairness and the abuse are not me, but the BBC licence-payers who are entitled to more respect for their opinions.

12 December 2009 9:10 PM

Is there any way this country can officially disown Anthony Blair? Those of us who were never fooled by him now have to watch as he cashes in on his time as Prime Minister in ways which are actually shaming.

His dishonesty, his lack of embarrassment and his greed are all so great that it is now possible to imagine him ending up munching gonads on I’m A Celebrity, perhaps trying to restore his fortunes after yet another failed property speculation. Or singing My Way on a talent show.

I am not sure whether to be furious or to laugh at this dark farce. I met Mr Blair before he was famous and concluded that he was an empty-headed soap actor, chosen by the Labour Party to be the plausible front-man for its slow-motion coup d’etat.

Then I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam. These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle.

But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory? The speech which he gave was such concentrated, congealed drivel that it probably had to be carried into and out of the room in a spittoon. You may read it in full on the web.

That is not all. Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. Like Mr Blair, I have been to Azerbaijan. Unlike him, I met opposition politicians and heard about its miserable history of censorship, repression and despotism.

President Aliyev, like Kim Jong Il, inherited his job from his father, the late KGB General Heydar Aliyev. And Heydar Aliyev inherited his job from the Kremlin, which installed him as ruler of Azerbaijan when it was a Soviet province. Opponents of the current President Aliyev get beaten up or imprisoned. There are reliable reports of torture, including threats to humiliate female relatives of political prisoners. Protesting demonstrators sometimes end up clubbed to death. He ‘won’ his last election with a comically unlikely 87 per cent of the vote.

Well, there is an old argument which says that if such people control big oil supplies, we pass over their faults for the sake of our economy. But that is an argument Mr Blair, and his few remaining defenders, simply cannot make – because they all claim to have been so outraged by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny that even his oil couldn’t save him. So I think we can conclude from this well-rewarded little visit that Mr Blair’s outrage against Saddam was as false as it looked. In which case, what is there left of this person that is worth a farthing, let alone £90,000?

Alan Bennett may have written it, but it’s still tripe

If the BBC isn’t sucking up to Stephen Fry (who will soon be presenting most of the programmes on all its TV and radio channels) it is sucking up to its other hero, Alan Bennett.

Mr Bennett once wrote some fine plays, but has now gone off, largely because he hasn’t grasped that the world has changed since the Sixties.

He is also responsible for a rather nasty drama, revived last week, in which the personally squalid Stalinist traitor Guy Burgess is portrayed as a sort of romantic exile. It ends with Burgess prancing through Moscow in a Savile Row suit to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan’s He Remains An Englishman, which is precisely what Burgess chose not to do when he betrayed his country to the mass-murderer Stalin.

This insulting tripe is supposed to be a minor classic. Would anyone dare write, let alone broadcast, a comparable play about the loneliness and plight of Lord Haw-Haw or John Amery in Berlin? Of course not.

So why does the grotesque and evil Burgess get this treatment? Because the sainted Mr Bennett wrote it.

The woodentops who stole our law

Most sensible people will have been relieved that the case of the offended hijab wearer was dismissed byan unusually wise and independent-minded judge. But the defendants were lucky, if anyone whose livelihood has been ruined by stupid state persecution can be called lucky.

Even if the allegations made against Benjamin and Sharon Vogelenzang had been true, it should not have been the business of the police or the courts in a free country. Freed from the ferocious dictates of political correctness – now written into our law – the police would have politely urged Ericka Tazi to cool off and forget it.

As for the People’s Prosecution Service, who spend half their time refusing to prosecute assaults and burglaries because the culprit hasn’t actually confessed to them on videotape, and so they’re scared of losing the case for ‘lack of evidence’, and most of the rest of the time reducing murder charges to manslaughter for a quick conviction, what did they think they were doing harassing two decent, hardworking citizens in this way?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. The law has been stolen from the people of this country, and seized by an unrepresentative and bigoted minority of anti-British, pro-crime, anti-Christian woodentops, who are often as stupid as they are unhelpful.

And when one of us defends themselves against the lawlessness our rulers permit to flourish, the police have the nerve to complain that he or she ‘has taken the law into their own hands’, and then to send them to jail. Well, whose hands should the law be in, exactly?

It is also worth noticing that the British Government presents itself as our defender against the Islamist menace, madly spying on kindergartens in search of tiny militants. Yet it uses the laws of England to defend Islam against the slightest criticism here at home. Which is the real policy?

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Patrolling Kabul in his suit, and picking his way round Helmand in body armour, David Cameron mouths the standard-issue pieties of all three front benches, namely that military ‘success’ is possible in Afghanistan.

Nobody who understands the issue believes anything of the kind. What we have is a failed intervention in an Afghan civil war, increasingly similar to the Russian operation that ended in total withdrawal, with nothing achieved and much lost. The only difference between us and the Soviets is that we haven’t yet realised we have failed. A proper patriot would tell the Americans that they can keep their idiotic war, and that we will be leaving as soon as practicable. But the Tories, as Mr Cameron’s recent sellout on the EU makes clear, aren’t really patriots. Hence their need to pretend to be, by posing in flak-jackets and going Army barmy, with lots of macho soldier-talk.

If this cost no lives and no money, it would merely be pathetic. As it actually costs heavily in both, it is wicked and cowardly.

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17 October 2009 6:54 PM

If a terrorist bombing campaign murdered 221 of our finest young men and women, and seriously injured another 600, can you begin to imagine the reactions of our knee-jerk Government?

There would be immediate imposition of compulsory identity cards, troops in sandbagged emplacements outside the Houses of Parliament, frenzied round-ups of hundreds of men with beards and the introduction of unlimited detention without trial.

The Prime Minister would rage, as they always do, that the culprits would be hunted down and punished (perhaps with the IRA’s Patrick Magee nodding sagely from the public gallery as he said it).But this event has happened, in slow motion and far away, and so we are urged to accept it as a necessary sacrifice in the alleged ‘War on Terror’. It is our futile, indefensible, bird-brained military operation in Afghanistan which provides British citizens as targets for Taliban killers.

If it has another purpose, you will not be able to discover what that is from the Government, which cannot make up its mind for more than five minutes what our troops are doing in Afghanistan.

Propping up the joke President? Protecting futile rigged elections?

Banning the growing of opium poppies, which is permitted in Oxfordshire?

Sponsoring a Cherie Blair-style sexual revolution among the Pashtuns, so all their women can become QCs?

The Islamic terrorism in this country is almost entirely home-grown. Where it does have foreign contacts and influences, these are unlikely to be in Afghanistan, which was also rather loosely connected with the September 11 outrages in the USA. Most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, remember.

All this is known to anyone who pays any serious attention.

It is known to Mr Brown. It is known to the Tories. It is known to the Liberal Democrats. It is increasingly understood by the British people, who have good reason to be suspicious of their leaders’ new fondness for foreign wars.

Yet on Wednesday, as MPs listened to the recitation of the latest military deaths in Afghanistan – that’s dozens of devastated homes, fatherless children, widowed women, shattered parents, and for what? – not a single frontbencher was willing to call for our withdrawal from this misconceived and costly operation.

Why not? What do these people think they are paid for? Why doesn’t one of them have one tenth of the courage of our soldiers?

If charming Maya is a criminal, so is Britain’s PM

Maya Evans, a charming vegan cook, still stands convicted of a criminal offence for reading out the names of 97 dead soldiers next to the Cenotaph in London, so contravening a law forbidding demonstrations within five furlongs of Parliament. The Prime Minister read out 37 names of dead soldiers within this cordon. Either Mr Brown should be charged and convicted of the same offence (there’s no shortage of witnesses), or the new Supreme Court should allow Miss Evans to appeal to them (she’s been refused leave) andoverturn her indefensible conviction.

Magee, the smirking face of defeat

How can you forgive someone who isn’t sorry, says he would commit the same crime again, and doesn’t want to be forgiven? It’s certainly beyond me. Patrick Magee, IRA mass murderer, ought long ago to have been buried in a pit of quicklime in the yard of some prison, having been hanged by the neck until dead.

That is what the Irish leader, Eamon de Valera, did to the IRA in 1940, and the Republic hasn’t been troubled by them since. Mind you, he understood what he was dealing with. An appointment with the noose might also have persuaded Magee to express what he has never uttered – genuine remorse for his wickedness.

The fact that Magee walks around smirking (regrettably accompanied by the daughter of one of his victims, who ought to know better) long ago ceased to anger me. There is no point in losing your temper about such things. I have come, in a grisly sort of way, to enjoy Magee’s TV outings and to hope that sooner or later he will be persuaded to appear on Strictly Come Dancing or I’m A Celebrity. And there is always Britain’s Got Talent, where he could entertain us with some Irish rebel songs.

That might bring home to all those who continue to simper about the wondrousness of the ‘Peace Process’ and the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ that these are but pretty names for an ugly thing, the cowardly surrender by our country to criminal gangsters – and that most of us supported it, though we knew it was wrong, for the sake of a quiet life. Which we did not get.

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Now we know that the Queen and Prince Philip, like the rest of us, are baffled by the malign electronic boxes that feed (or fail to feed) programmes into our TV sets. I suspect that millions of people are spending hours lying on the floor, cursing and fiddling with these things. And for what? It’s all such rubbish. The Australian government is now rightly warning that TV is deeply damaging for small children, and it’s about time our Government did the same. Could the age of TV be coming to an end? I do so hope so.

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I am growing tired of the selective way in which the parliamentary expenses scandal is being reported.

We’re now being told over and over again that the issue is not that MPs broke the rules, but that they made claims that were obviously greedy and wrong. In that case, why does David Cameron, who chargedthe taxpayers close to the maximum for interest on an enormous mortgage on a large country house, get away with it?

Mr Cameron’s constituency is within commuting distance of London. Many Witney people make the journey daily. If he couldn’t face that, what was wrong with a small rented flat?

If he had to have a house, why did it need to be so big and why did we have to help pay for it? While Mr Cameron vaguely denies talk of a huge fortune, he is certainly independently wealthy and could afford his own second home.

He should order himself to resign for bringing discredit on his party. But he won’t, mainly because the power-worshippers of the media pack are in love with him (for now) and won’t go after him for it.

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Supposedly pro-parent Shadow Schools Minister Michael Gove has assured state school heads of his ‘dedication’ to the ‘comprehensive ideal’. One or the other, Michael. Not both.

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Former Schools Commissar and Interior Minister David Blunkett proposes to give his brain to science after his death. Resisting the temptation to make ribald suggestions about what other parts of Mr Blunkett may be of greater interest to science, I wonder if Anthony Blair couldn’t be persuaded to donate his brain straight away.

My guess is that, having managed without using it all these years, he probably wouldn’t miss it much.

And he would mind even less when people accused him of being a war criminal, or refused to shake hands with him – an experience he is going to be having rather a lot of in years to come. The only problem would be locating the brain in his very big head.

06 June 2009 5:02 PM

Here’s some real politics for you, instead of the usual meaningless rubbish about Gordon Brown. For once, the politicians actually agree that a crime was their fault – though only because the grisly killer Dano Sonnex was loose, not because he is the sort of man he is.

In my view, our political class is responsible for most of our crime because they have destroyed morality and abandoned the ideas of right and wrong.

Even so, credit where it’s due. The Injustice Secretary, Jack Straw, admits that – even under liberal elite rules – Sonnex should have been in custody at the time he cruelly killed two French students.

Of course he should. He was a convicted criminal, released much too early from a ludicrously brief prison sentence, and then ‘monitored’ so feebly that he received nothing more than a ‘verbal warning’ for tying up and threatening a couple.

Now, if only he’d defended his home from louts with an air pistol, or made a ‘homophobic’ remark, he’d have been led away to the cells by grim-jawed jailers. But tying people up and threatening them? In that case, you need help from your social worker.

Now, when did you ever vote for this feeble treatment of criminals? That’s right. You didn’t. The arrogant parasites of New Labour and Blue Labour, who run this country by turns, decided it without asking you, as they decide everything else.

Then they filched your money so that they can live, among hedges and twittering birds, at a safe distance from the results of their views. For money is about the only way to escape the insecurity, the disorder, the squalor, the jammed roads and rattling trains, the useless police, the comical courts, the pathetic schools, the pinched, frightened old age, the filth-encrusted hospitals and the last miserable days in the dying-rooms of the NHS that the rest of us now have to dread.

It was just starting to get interesting last Sunday. For once, it looked as if we were not going to be diverted into another futile change from Tweedledum to Tweedledumber. Revolution was in the air. The Tory enemy of Britain (responsible for getting us into the EU and keeping us there, so losing control of our borders; to blame for dreaming up the wheeze of cutting prison sentences; answerable for wrapping the police in bureaucracy; complicit in the undermining of the family and in abandoning the poor to bad schools) was in as much trouble as the Labour enemy of Britain – you must know by now, surely, what is wrong with them.

The expenses scandal had reached – as it should have done from the start – the opulent front gates of Mr Cameron.

We had, it was revealed, paid for those gates. And paid, and paid. For a weekend home in a constituency 75 miles from London, a distance that many of his own electors (and many others, too) must commute daily, he required from us an interest-free mortgage of £350,000, so as to top up the £300,000 in cash he happened to have handy already. And at the same time he was able to pay off the remaining mortgage on his London house, later sold for more than £1million.

Why is this all right? Why should we pay for this, with taxes gouged from our wage-packets on pain of imprisonment? We’d all love a £350,000 interest-free loan. But we know we’re not entitled to one. Why didn’t he know that?

What is morally different between asking us to subsidise his spacious luxury and paying for a duck house or a clean moat? In many ways, it seems to me worse, especially given the righteous, smarmy way in which he has driven other offenders from Parliament to save his own skin.

But this excellent story somehow died. The BBC, which reckons its beloved Blairism is safe in Mr Cameron’s hands, did its best to ignore it. The ‘centre Left’ and ‘centre Right’ Press wouldn’t pick it up and run with it.

Back we went to the futile tedium of Brown-bashing, with all the thrill of the national finals of a corpse-kicking championship. Mr Cameron’s many volunteer media bodyguards formed a square around him. The Tory crisis never happened.

They knew what they were guarding against. If both Labour and the Tories collapsed at once, we might get a new party which believed (for example) in locking up people like Dano Sonnex, instead of giving them verbal warnings. That is the thing our establishment really fears.

‘Entertainment’ fit for Nero

How we used to snigger at supposedly ‘primitive’ peoples who feared having their photographs taken because the camera might steal their souls. But in the miserable case of Susan Boyle we see that they had a point.

TV, a foul invention which has done limitless damage to human society, can do terrible things to those who appear on it as well as to those who watch it. Once, I was invited on to that repellent programme Have I Got News For You. This was big-audience entertainment TV, unlike the ‘serious’ current affairs programmes I am normally permitted to grace.

The producers rightly concluded that we weren’t meant for each other. I despise the things they revere, and revere the things they despise.

But in the week after the show, the effect was slightly terrifying. Large numbers of total strangers suddenly knew who I was and had opinions about me. To a worrying extent, I was no longer my own property. Unlike poor Miss Boyle, I had known what I was doing and had some idea of what to expect.

Also, HIGNFY was small potatoes compared with Britain’s Got Talent, a programme I suspect would have appealed to the Emperor Nero.

Not merely does TV suck the individuality and imagination out of those who watch it, it is in love with the fake and deeply cruel to the wholly innocent.

Those in between shouldn’t feel safe either.

Now we’re all living in Peking

Just 20 years ago we were thrilled by the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I thought it was a new birth of freedom. We ought to have paid more attention to the crushing of the protesters in Peking’s Tiananmen Square. For this was a much more important new birth – of tyranny mixed with the market. As a result of this ruthless action, China is now a World Power, chief creditor of the USA, heir to the future.

And that power is the model for us all. We can have consumer goods and cars and electronic junk we don’t really need, oceans of drivel on TV to keep us numb, even drugs too. We can live in colossal concrete mega-cities, Livingstonegrads or Borisgrads, where we can only tell which continent we’re on by checking the script on the neon signs. But we can’t be free, and we can’t have countries of our own, or borders, or histories.

We also cringe to China, and in future we will do so even more, which is why I won’t call Peking ‘Beijing’, any more than I’ll call Rome ‘Roma’ or Moscow ‘Moskva’.

You suspected it was this bad. I am reliably told that a London University academic was asked by a Whitehall department, two weeks before our mad invasion of Iraq, whether by any chance he had a map of Basra because the British Government couldn’t find one. You wonder what else they don’t know. Or if they actually know anything.

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26 May 2009 8:27 AM

What follows is an expanded version of an account I wrote (for the Mail on Sunday of 24th May) of David Cameron's supposed open meeting with the voters on the subject of the Commons scandal. I don't live in Mr Cameron's constituency, but I do live close enough to it to have bicycled to his Friday meeting in Witney, which is being portrayed, in my view misleadingly, as David Cameron braving the people on the subject of MPs' expenses.

Here's the article:

‘You might think that David Cameron had subjected himself to the wrath of the voters on Friday and come away unscathed. Reports and pictures have appeared of Mr Cameron facing an allegedly open meeting in the Witney Corn Exchange. The Leader of the Opposition - unlike Andrew MacKay - escaped without any angry heckling.

This is despite the fact that Mr Cameron is far from being in the clear. He admits to having wrongly claimed £680 to clear wisteria from the chimney of his spacious country home. And he got us taxpayers to pay the interest (£1,700 a month for most of the last eight years) on his £350,000 mortgage, a mortgage he may not actually need. But why spend your own money when the public will pay for you to have an interest-free loan?

Well, I was there and I can tell you how Mr Cameron managed to get such a smooth ride. First of all, the meeting was at noon on a Friday, a time when most people with jobs haven't time to go to meetings.

Second, the local Tories did what they could to hold a supposedly public occasion in private. I only knew of it because of a brief mention of it in my local paper, the 'Oxford Mail'. The website of Witney Conservatives seems to be frozen in time, and doesn't deal with any of Mr Cameron's engagements since 24th April.

When I turned up on the doorstep, it was guarded by various apparatchiks sitting at desks with lists, and making it look as if it was in some way a members-only function. An inexperienced person, new to politics, might easily have been put off. The aides gulped visibly when they saw me, but had more sense than to try to keep me out.

A freelance TV truck was parked outside, but nothing from Sky or the BBC. When, I wonder, were the big broadcasters informed of the event? And who decided which clips of the occasion they saw? Mr Cameron had a mike clipped to his tie, so anything he said could be recorded, but questioners were not offered a microphone and any heckling or hostility - had it happened - would have been indistinct on videotape.

Once the meeting started, it was clear that the local loyalists had been summoned to fill most of the 200 seats. The average age was well over 50. Mr Cameron recognised almost every questioner by name, and most of them addressed him familiarly as ‘David’. Every trick in the Tony Blair Fake Sincerity Handbook was used. There was no lectern, so Mr Cameron looked defenceless and vulnerable. He took off his jacket as soon as questions began, and he deployed his (absent) wife as a human shield when awkward questions - about how rich they are - came up. Do we have a £30 million fortune? Chuckle. Samantha must have spent it all, ha ha. No specific answer, though.

Apart from me, the only seriously troublesome questioner was a lone Liberal Democrat. And after Mr Cameron eventually allowed me to ask my question (which he didn't answer), the final say was given to a fervent Cameron fan, who decried any suggestions that Mr Cameron had done anything wrong.

The Tory leader knew he was safe. He was so sure he was among friends that he used a rude word beginning with 'a', and offered, rashly to work for half the pay.

If Mr Cameron really wants to find out what the people of West Oxfordshire think about him, his mortgage and his chimney, I suggest he hires a bigger hall, advertises the event both to local people and the national media, and holds it when normal men and women won't be at work.’

And here are some extracts from what he said, with my thoughts on them. I can't provide a complete transcript and don't claim this is one. But I have selected some parts which I think were specially interesting. He insisted he needed two homes, even though he admitted it was possible to commute the distance (many in his constituency do, and it is about 75 miles each way). He said that his children were educated in London (which is true) and that Parliament still sits late on Monday or Tuesday night. Well, yes, but I would say that a constituency home is a convenience rather than an absolute necessity. If his children are at school in London, then he will in any case be in London on Monday or Tuesday, the only days when the Commons usually sits late. He only really needs to be in his constituency all day on Fridays and perhaps Saturdays - a need that could be met, in my view, by a comfortable bed and breakfast or at most a small house or flat. I am still unconvinced by the idea that MPs with seats outside London need two homes as a matter of course. Members with remote constituencies obviously need a toehold in London, an expensive place to live. MPs with seats in or very close to London obviously don't need two homes at all. I do wonder, if Mr Cameron sat for a less picturesque part of the country (and west Oxfordshire is delightful), around the same distance from Notting Hill, whether he would be so keen to have a weekend home there, and take his family there so often.

I've put in the occasional 'er' or 'erm' where I think it adds to the account, ie in showing hesitation, but not all of them. And I've also mentioned audience laughter, to illustrate the general sympathy of the curiously assembled audience with Mr Cameron, which I believe is explained above. I've also inserted some commentary of my own.

Mr Cameron explained his rules: ‘What I claim for, I always tried to ask myself 'What is it reasonable to claim for ... not what the rules say, but what is reasonable?’

He then set out what he regarded as reasonable. ’From 2001 to 2007 the only thing I really claimed for in respect of my second home was the interest on a mortgage, not the repayments but the interest. It was a very large mortgage, it was £350,000 worth of mortgage, it was about £1,700 a month that I was claiming. That was quite close to the maximum you could claim at the time but I did not at that stage claim for anything else...’

My comment: To me, £350,000 seems to be a colossal mortgage, especially for someone on a Parliamentary salary, as he was when he first took it on, or even the Leader of the Opposition's salary, which he is now drawing. We do not know whether this sum paid in full for the Camerons' country home. I would suspect that it probably didn't, since large properties in pleasant Oxfordshire villages generally went, even eight years ago, for rather more than that. Several questions arise. Could he have paid for the property out of his own resources? Did he need such a large house? Did he, before the current scandal, assume that he was bound to benefit in the long term from the likely increase in the price of the house during what promised to be a long political career? Now, of course, this is ruled out, but was it then? And £1,700 a month, tax free, is a lot of money, more than the total that comes into quite a few households. How urgent would the need be to justify this?

Mr Cameron continued: ’....In 2007 I was able to pay down the mortgage a little bit, so it was a £250,000 mortgage, paying about £1,000 in mortgage interest every month, and so I also claimed for what I would call some pretty straightforward household bills, council tax, oil, gas, erm, and other utility type bills and insurance on the property. And that has been the case from the beginning of 2007 right through to now. I now claim less than the maximum allowed, I don't claim all of those utility bills, I claim a percentage of them, because I think that's right and fair.’

My comment: He 'paid down' the mortgage' a 'little bit'. That 'little bit' turns out to be £100,000, once again a very large sum by most people's standards. And also, if you choose to run a second home, shouldn't you accept that it's up to you to insure it, pay the fuel bills and council tax on it? And wouldn't it be prudent to choose such a home on the basis that you would want to keep such bills low, rather than expect others to defray them?

‘But I have claimed one bill that I thought was questionable, and so I decided to pay it back. This is the infamous wisteria bill (laughter) as it will now always be known. It was actually a maintenance bill. It was a bill for £680 and it was a bill I claimed at the time because I judged it was about maintenance not about decoration or improvement. It was to mend a leaky roof, it was to put some outside lights on the property for security and mend some ones that were broken and it was to remove this infamous wisteria which was nothing to do with pruning a plant. It was because I have a chimney with a fan on it to get the smoke out so I can light a fire. It had stopped working and the wisteria needed to be removed from it. I claimed for that bill because I thought it was maintenance not decoration but I think MPs have got to show a lead and have got to show some responsibility and have got to take any bill that is frankly questionable or borderline and pay it back. So that is what I am going to do. I am not aware of any other bill for my second home that is inappropriate or should be paid back but were one to emerge in this great process I will happily do that.‘

My comment: It is not clear from this whether Mr Cameron really thinks he ought to have paid back the wisteria money. It sounds to me as if he thinks he was justified in claiming it but announced he would pay it back for the sake of appearances. Otherwise, why the long, long justification? Why should we worry about whether he can light a fire or not?

He gave a long explanation in defence of MPs' office expenses, and promised to look through his office expenses in case there were any questionable payments, which he promised to pay back.

He made it clear that he had done no 'flipping', switching the designation of his 'second home' so as to maximise claims. And he added:

‘I always try to ask what is reasonable to claim, not what can you claim. I have never claimed for cleaners, gardeners, furniture, food, decorations, duck houses (laughter), moats (laughter), swimming pools or anything like that. I am not putting up my hand and saying I am whiter than white - that didn't get Tony Blair anywhere (laughter) or saying I am better than anybody else but it's just a judgement I took that there were sensible things to claim - that I did claim even though I am relatively well off because the claim was there if you needed to maintain a second home - and I think to do my job properly I need to maintain a second home.’

My comment: How do these rules apply? If this is right for him, what about other MPs, especially Tory frontbenchers, who have claimed for some or all of the things above? Should they go, without exception? If not, what does it mean that Mr Cameron thinks it is wrong to claim these things? Also, his statement that he is ‘relatively well off’ raises the question of how well off he is. He has brushed aside the suggestion, made by the wealth expert Philip Beresford, that Mr and Mrs Cameron together are worth £30 million, and said it was untrue on the Andrew Marr programme. Very well then. I think he's entitled to reasonable privacy on this, and doesn't have to reveal the exact contents of his bank accounts. But can someone please put to him the question in a public place: ’Could you have afforded to pay for your Oxfordshire home yourself?’

Listening to my tape of the Question and Answer session I notice that almost all the questions are general, addressed to Mr Cameron as Opposition Leader or political pundit, not as an individual MP who might himself have gone too far in living on the public payroll. That's not surprising, if my analysis above is right. I've also begun to notice that Mr Cameron now makes much of the fact that Parliament has lost much of its power to ‘Europe’ and the Judges. He speaks as if he plans to correct this. But he knows perfectly well that unless Britain leaves the EU, most of our legislation will be imposed on us by the European Commission. So this seems to me to be just talk. A small digression here. Vikki Boynton posted last week that the Tory position on Lisbon is: ’If the Lisbon Treaty is not yet in force at the time of the next general election, and a Conservative Government is elected, we would put the Treaty to a referendum of the British people, recommending a 'no' vote. If the British people rejected the Treaty, we would withdraw Britain's ratification of it.’ Seems clear.‘

Yes, it does *seem* clear. It is meant to seem clear. But it is not. A British withdrawal of ratification would be followed by immense pressure from the EU to change that position. There is a great appetite in Brussels to get on with ratification. How would a Cameron government respond to that pressure? I believe it would 'negotiate' a 'compromise' that would end with Lisbon coming into force more or less as it is. That is the key question, and one you won't get an answer to. Only a government which clearly wished to leave the EU could possibly escape from this bind.

One other small point about Mr Cameron's performance. At one stage he spoke repeatedly about how many peers (or rather how few) he had 'created'. So far as I know, it is the Queen who creates political peers, on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Leader of the Opposition, by convention, may usually suggest names, but (as happened to William Hague over one controversial nomination) the Prime Minister may decline to take his advice. It passed me by at the time, numbed as I was by the general sycophancy, but the person sitting next to me (a distinguished commentator who shall remain nameless) pointed it out and I thought I would share it with you.